10 ways in which a content delivery network helps you provide optimal and secure web performance 

This post is brought to you by Akamai Technologies

Picture this: An e-commerce business has a fantastic web page with ample eye-catching visuals and features to attract users. Initially impressed, when a user in a remote location starts navigating this website, that’s when the real story unfolds. The page takes a lot of time to load, half the images are not visible, the user has to re-enter his information on repeat visits, and in the process he or she loses patience with the website and leaves the page without making a purchase. These are some of the pain points faced by several businesses. An efficient content delivery network (CDN) could have saved the business from the above scenario.

As the amount of digital content generated by enterprises grows exponentially, the market for good CDN services to streamline and provide faster and more secure delivery of such content is also growing very fast. Across industries, businesses are opting for CDNs for a number of reasons, and here are just 10 of the reasons why you should consider a CDN for your business.

Improved speed: In this fast-paced world, consumers often expect instant gratification, and a page that takes longer to load can mean a drop in conversion rates. CDNs greatly reduce such latency and ensure optimal distribution of content so that it is closer to end users, and thus faster to download.

Better user experience: From reducing the time the page takes to load, to ensuring content is delivered to any device, anytime, irrespective of the connection the end user is on, to bringing down checkout times thereby lowering the risk of dropping customers, and ensuring that end users don’t leave the page, a CDN will provide enhanced user experience.

Scalability: A CDN can help ensure the stability of your website by minimising the risk of traffic spikes, relieving the pressure on your own servers and removing the risk of downtime during seasonal peaks. A CDN provides better performance through caching or replicating content over surrogate servers strategically placed at various locations in order to deal with the sudden spike in requests, and users are redirected to the surrogate server nearest to them.

Easy to set up: After choosing a good CDN provider, the implementation is not very complicated. A CDN is easily set up without making too many changes to the existing infrastructure. In fact, some providers can set up and get a CDN running for your website within 48 hours

Content Security: A CDN that meets stringent network, software, data and procedural security requirements can eliminate the need for costly hardware and other dedicated components to protect content and transactions. A CDN has the capability to combat against any potential risk concerns including DDoS attacks or other malicious activity, since it has its own large distributed server infrastructure to absorb the volume of the attack.

Catering to the growing m-Commerce market: With the growing use of smartphones and tablets used to access the Internet, business users and consumers want content that is available at their fingertips, regardless of the device they are using. A good CDN can help better the performance of your mobile site by ensuring faster load times for content.

Improved search rankings: How much time a website takes to load very often plays a key part in it its SEO ranking. Since CDNs work to optimise page speeds, this can positively impact the search rankings for a website.

Helps maintain a good brand image: A CDN enables a website to focus on providing fast and reliable services or responses, and this reinforces the message that the business is reliable and customer-oriented.

Cost Savings: Since CDNs offload traffic to a greater number of edge servers, the load imposed on each one diminishes and improves performance. Additionally, this also this brings down the expense of adding new hardware to manage content delivery.

Efficient distribution: CDNs use server optimisations based on content type to get that content to the user most efficiently.

In this day and age where people want to always stay connected, a situational performance solution such as Akamai’s Ion, offers the next level of intelligence and interoperability through an integrated suite of content delivery, acceleration and optimisation technologies for any device, any connection, anywhere. This results in a rich engaging end user experience based on the end user’s unique situation and context, reduced complexities in delivery, and even helps in cutting down costs.

Akamai’s integrated CDN solution is uniquely positioned to address the growing online needs and challenges of any business across industries and add value to your offerings. Experience the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform for yourself. Sign up for a free trial of Akamai's market leading acceleration and media delivery solutions.